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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25537861">Tom Riddle, Harry Potter and the Little Diagon Alley Flat of Secrets</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayachain/pseuds/maya_brainstormed'>maya_brainstormed (mayachain)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood Brothers, Book 2: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Fluff and Crack, Gen, Moving In Together, Out of Character, Summer Vacation, borderline notfic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 08:42:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,860</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25537861</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayachain/pseuds/maya_brainstormed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry’s blood gets spilled onto the diary and onto the by now nearly solid spectre of Tom himself. Lives and fates are changed.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Harry Potter &amp; Tom Riddle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>74</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Tom Riddle, Harry Potter and the Little Diagon Alley Flat of Secrets</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I wanted to tag this "unfinished and discontinued", but it isn't? Quite? It won't be any more finished than it is, it skirts the line into not!fic, and it is very self-indulgent, so be warned.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>
    <span class="u">Tom Riddle, Harry Potter and the Little Diagon Alley Flat of Secrets</span>
  </b>
</p><p>So they are down in the Chamber of Secrets and there is fighting and Ginny dying and a basilisk and Harry and Tom. So much is happening so fast and things are very difficult.</p><p>Harry’s blood gets spilled onto the diary and onto the by now nearly solid spectre of Tom himself.</p><p>And – this is not the ritual Tom has Pettigrew perform in fourth year. This is not planned. This is not how anyone, least of all Voldemort when he made his first Horcrux at sixteen, saw things going at all.</p><p>Harry’s blood is spilled – Lily Potter’s blood is spilled – and a connection is forced.</p><p>Some of it is based in intent. In Harry’s intent to die trying to save Ginny or not at all. Lily’s intent to save her son. Tom’s intent to escape death.</p><p>Some of it they will never completely understand no matter how hard they try.</p><p>The long and short of it is: Harry’s blood restores Tom’s body. The diary dissolves into nothingness.</p><p>The magic swirling around the room makes the basilisk freeze.</p><p>Tom realizes several things very quickly:</p><p>The connection to Ginny Weasley is gone, no longer needed; the girl doesn’t need to die after all.</p><p>Harry Potter is rather important. If Tom wants to understand what just happened, the boy better not die.</p><p>And there’s something else, something far more visceral.</p><p>This visceral thing is felt by Harry as well: One second he is fighting for his life, for Ginny’s life, and the next everything is different because Tom now shares Harry’s mother’s blood protection.</p><p>And the thing that changes the world, here, the world as Harry Potter knows it, is this: The second Tom Riddle no longer needs Ginny to die to live himself, he steps back.</p><p>He stops his attack.</p><p>Harry lives. Ginny lives. The basilisk lives. Tom lives. (Fawkes lives.)</p><p>There’s silence. (There’s heavy breathing, and a scales slithering over ground, and hearts hammering in their ears, and very faint, very soft breathing from the girl who is quite unconscious.)</p><p>Harry has always felt it in his scar when Voldemort was near. Tom Riddle at sixteen and newly resurrected is not Voldemort, despite his claim, but they both feel it.</p><p>Like calls to like. Neither of them understands it, but for Horcrux!Tom it is instinct: Like calls to like, and so he reaches out with his Legilimency, and – </p><p>is instantly overwhelmed by the impressions rushing into his head by a decades’ older (younger) Horcrux.</p><p>He breaks the connection with a cry. That was not smart.</p><p>What is far smarter is all that Harry gained during all this: Impressions of who Tom Riddle is, this boy who was seen as so above it all and feared for his life every second of every day and was so. Alone.</p><p>Harry used to be alone.</p><p>Harry used to be alone, and now Tom is alive due to Lily Potter’s blood, and they are connected, and things could be different.</p><p>First things first: Rescuing Ginny. Telling a story. Finding an explanation Dumbledore will believe.</p><p>Then: Talking. Lots of talking, hours of talking after they meet up again.</p><p>And: Tom reaching out to the Horcrux in Harry’s scar in a far more controlled setting, learning all that his future self knew in 1981 without letting any of that knowledge touch him.</p><p>(Prophecy, what the shit? He cannot kill Harry now, they are connected! Easily manipulated older self had better not try it!)</p><p>And: Tom slipping out of the school, going to Gringotts, buying a flat. Difficult, but not impossible, the term is at least two weeks longer yet.</p><p>And: The basilisk victims being awakened, Hermione reunited with her friends, Ginny reassured that she is blameless, and Harry keeping some things to himself.</p><p>And: No need to return to Muggle relatives. He’s living with his mother’s blood. They are connected. </p><p>*</p><p>So then Tom has rented a small flat just off Diagon Alley. The goal is to buy something larger at a later time, but for now, things are still a little iffy legally, and so it is better to do it this way to minimize the amount of people asking questions.</p><p>His physical body is about sixteen years old. The memories he extracted from Harry’s Horcrux are around fifty years older (and even include a small glimpse into Harry and Voldemort’s first year confrontation), but at most he can pass as just barely seventeen.</p><p>There was a lot of haggling involved with the goblins. The older Tom Riddle did have a Gringotts vault, not that he could access it or that there was ever much in it in the first place. (Although his memories tell him that Voldemort later completely discarded the possibility that he would ever need it, as a young man he did plant a nest egg, and this is what Tom now needs to access.) What cinched it was that Tom had a body and his other self did not, and that he, not the other, was therefore able to prove that he was Tom Marvolo Riddle by blood.</p><p>It possibly helped that he came into the bank without a wand, simply because he didn’t yet have one, having grudgingly given Ginny Weasley hers  - it had in any case not been working well for him.</p><p>So he has enough for food, for rent, and to make the place liveable before Harry comes to join him. (The idea of it is still so weird – he never truly got along with other children, every instance where they fell in like with him was pretend, as an orphan with nary a chance to be adopted he had never thought of himself as becoming an older brother of all things…)</p><p>He is in the process of negotiating access to vaults his mother’s family lost access to long ago. His older self never managed it, which was a major point of contention for him – but Tom is not a young man just out of school out to prove himself (technically, he graduated decades ago; technically, he only recently passed his OWLs). No, Tom has the determination of youth but a patience his other self didn’t have – being trapped in a diary for far too many years has to be good for something.</p><p>He has all the potential Tom Riddle had at sixteen. He has not yet squandered it. He, remarkable as it may seem, has not made a single Horcrux. He has not stained his soul to perform the deed. And it is this potential, the vast amount of magical possibilities, as well as his blood, that he can harness in a way other!Riddle never could because he’d botched it when he’d created – well, Tom.</p><p>The Slytherin line (and the Gaunt line after it) were no strangers to dark magic. Not in the least. But the Slytherin line was very adamantly against diminishing the self – something Tom could not have known. </p><p>The Gaunts had diminished themselves through inbreeding. Original Tom Riddle had diminished himself through his own arrogance (and fear. Such crippling fear). </p><p>Newly embodied sixteen-year-old Tom has no such problems. He is a Parselmouth of the Slytherin line and he brims with pure magics. </p><p>He is underage. He is a half-blood.</p><p>One of these facts will soon change.</p><p>And then Tom will gain access to what is left to the magically entailed Slytherin estate. (Exept for what old Salazar had specified should only ever be passed on to purebloods – but oh, wait, the ring and the locket, he knows where those are, so, no problems.)</p><p>For now, he has a flat. He has food. He has, wonder of wonders, something that his older self had often ordered about but ever owned: A house-elf. </p><p>He has a new wand.</p><p>And he has a brother just waiting to journey back to London on the Hogwarts Express.</p><p>*</p><p>When Harry gets off the Hogwarts Express, everything is completely surreal. Part of him was expecting Vernon and Petunia to wait for him at the other side of the barrier, but when he emerges, there is nobody there. (There are so many people there, among them Hermione’s parents, a few wizards and witches fitting in less than more, and Muggles, so, so many Muggles – so when Harry lies, and calls, “I see them, bye!” and gestures vaguely in the direction of another tube, everyone, even Mrs. Weasley – distracted, admittedly, by Ginny - believes it.)</p><p>His relatives are not there.</p><p>Harry has never taken the tube by himself. He took the train back to Surrey from London that one time, but Hagrid had put him on it. But he is a Gryffindor, and Tom told him exactly where to go if he wanted to go to Diagon. The only thing that can go wrong is if the directions given him are outdated, if the line he’s on doesn’t go where Harry needs it to go anymore –</p><p>(But if that were the case, Tom would have written to him with new and improved instructions. Because Harry gets off the tube after four stops and there Tom is waiting for him, and he would have checked, wouldn’t he, if there was a need to send new and improved instructions to Harry.)</p><p>They don’t hug; the meeting is a little awkward. But they both smile, and they can each feel it, no working occlumency barriers here – they are both happy to see each other again.</p><p>Tom cast a subtle levitation charm on Harry’s trunk and makes it look as if he is doing the heavy carrying now that he’s fetched his little brother, leaving Harry with Hedwig’s cage and a cloak that was needed up in Hogsmeade but isn’t in London, it’s too warm.</p><p>They board a bus and take it to a stop one block away from the Leaky Cauldron. Harry quickly goes under his father’s cloak and trails after Tom, who crosses the pub as quickly as possible. Then it’s the enchanted wall and down the street and just off the corner there five houses, into the second one and up two flights of stairs it is.</p><p>And there. There is a door, painted blood red for some reason none of them cares to explain, looking ordinary otherwise – perfectly ordinary. But Tom touches the handle and it glows and then Harry touches the handle and it glows and while there is a key, Harry is dead certain that this ordinary blood-red door can now only be opened by either of them.</p><p>Harry opens it.</p><p>He opens it into a room with blue-green walls and everything, absolutely everything, they had talked about.</p><p>(Tom only had two weeks to organize this?! He must be magic!)</p><p>(Truthfully the flat of theirs is objectively not very much at all. It has two small bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchen and a bath, a small pantry and a broom closet. But – okay, so Tom has older!Tom’s memories, but nonetheless neither of them has ever had their own place before. By the way it became Harry’s prison last summer, Dudley’s second bedroom really, really doesn’t count. And so just that they have their own space – Tom wants to upgrade, and they will, but for the time being this will suffice – the fact that they have their own kitchen and they can cook in it and eat everything they have been cooking!! It’s amazing.)</p><p>(Tom has never really cooked before, but he was forced into kitchen duty many times, he knows how to peel potatoes, okay, and also he is plenty skilled in Potions, which translates. At least the result was edible those times he experimented and didn’t just buy a pie or something off a shelf. Harry never minded the task of cooking meals per se, at least not once he became skilled enough at it that there was hardly any risk of his labours burning – and the ensuing punishment – but hardly ever being allowed to enjoy his creations mightily took the shine off. That’s not the problem now. He can eat half of everything he makes, now. And he can even choose what to make!! That’s amazing.)</p><p>(Their house-elf is a quiet sort, very different than what Harry expects from house-elves after knowing Dobby, and is of the opinion that cleaning up after two teenage boys is quite enough work to get on with, and will only ever take over the cooking if asked.)</p><p>Harry sleeps that night in a bed that is all his own. This has never been true before. Certainly not at the Dursley’s, and not at Hogwarts, and not at the Weasley’s in a cot in Ron’s room.</p><p>His own bed. His own room. His own kitchen!</p><p>The new day is started with the application Tom is really proud of. It’s a specialized form of the notice-me-not charm, which will ensure that all the wizards and witches in Diagon Alley and possibly Knockturn and the other magical nooks and crannies of wizarding London are going to see Harry Potter spending his day among them – without paying the fact that he is <i>the Harry Potter</i> unwanted attention. It’s a spell that comes with the caveat that it must not be used for anything nefarious – else the Goblins would not countenance anyone entering their bank while under it – and thus it was very rarely used by the Death Eaters (or maybe Tom had rather coveted its use for himself, had not wanted to risk any of his followers deceiving him, and had ultimately found shows of force much more convenient – older Tom turns out to not have been the smartest of fellows, much to diary!Tom’s disappointment).</p><p>There aren’t many people around any longer who would recognize Tom Riddle at (almost) seventeen (sixteen and five months, if he elects not to confuse himself and contrary goblins with maths and just reclaims his birthday), but just in case, Tom puts himself under the spell too. Since they are together when the spell is applied (and they want each other to know who they are) they are not confounded by each other’s image.</p><p>(Would this spell fool Albus Dumbledore? Tom certainly hopes so, but he’d rather not risk it. No, best avoid the old wizard for as long as possible.)</p><p>So after a hearty breakfast they venture out into wizarding London. They fetch Harry some money from his trust vault and then go out gallivanting.</p><p>The first time Tom had been here, he had been alone. He had been very cautious and conscious of how he must look, an eleven-year-old orphan. The first time Harry had been here, he had been (nominally) under Hagrid’s supervision, overwhelmed by the experience and not allowed (and not quite brave enough) to explore on his own.</p><p>Tom had been to Diagon as often as possible since, even if his older self’s trips to Diagon had been less frequent. But acquired memories aside, within his own life span he had never had the funds to go for whatever he wanted, so the visits had been filled with wonder but also silent resentment.</p><p>Since he got free from the diary, everything is different.</p><p>(Since a much younger copy of Harry’s parents’ murderer got free from an old diary, everything is different.)</p><p>Tom wants to show Harry things, but also support him in his own endeavour to explore. They can explore this new world together. (And the knowledge Tom gained from the Horcrux can help keep them safe while they do it; for all the pain Voldemort caused it’s the least he can do.)</p><p>They spend the whole day ever discovering new things, purchasing snacks when they are hungry and going where their feet take them. And at the end of the day, they don’t have to leave! No one is making them leave! Their flat is right there around one corner just off Diagon Alley, and tomorrow, if they want, they can do it all again!</p><p>Tom has been here for two weeks already. The novelty of freedom has not worn off.</p><p>(They buy some groceries, where Tom fills an entire basket with fresh fruit, and Harry gathers whatever fancies take him – some healthy, some not. He is the one buying these groceries, he is the one to decide! He will decide (while asking Tom what are his favourites) what to make of these groceries he is buying! Dudley will get none of it! - Maybe he should take a picture and send it to his cousin via Muggle post; if the school nurse still has him on a diet, which is likely, he will know what it feels like to go hungry while others eat whatever they want!)</p><p>(But who wants to waste time feeling vindictive toward Dudley Dursley when there is so much wonder in the world – and here, with Tom, Harry can finally reach for all of it!)</p><p>Life is awesome. The last two years have definitely been filled with ups and downs, mainly because sometimes people were trying to kill him. Harry doesn’t doubt that at the very least older!Tom/Voldemort still wants him dead, and so does possibly Lucius Malfoy, but Tom doesn’t and he’s away from the Dursleys and life is awesome.</p><p>So.</p><p>They explore Diagon Alley and the less glamorous parts of Wizarding London, but they do also take a trip or two into London itself. Tom feels no particular desire to show Harry the orphanage, but seeing as they probably will go and deal with the Dursleys at some point it’s only fair. And somehow standing in front of a building with a wizard brother he has claimed for himself, knowing that Mrs. Cole is long dead and even Martha must have by now become a pensioner, the place… doesn’t hold power over him any longer.</p><p>He’ll never have to go back. London isn’t burning any more either, which helps, but even if it did, Tom and Harry could just go somewhere else. They have done. They have gone somewhere else.</p><p>They also do some sightseeing. Things Tom always wanted to see but even Voldemort never did because that would have meant admitting to himself that Muggles had some achievements that had poked his interest – never mind admitting any of it to the Death Eathers. Things Harry never got to see and wants to, trips the Dursleys took without him and bragged about, but also a thing or two like the London Science Museum and the Tower of London for which Petunia had deemed her Dudders not quite old enough. And then there are other things they discover while reading about them in the pamphlets they get from the Tourist Information.</p><p>And that’s only London.</p><p>Tom knows how to apparate, even if he doesn’t yet have a license. (Well, Tom Riddle has one, but there is that pesky little temporal distortion problem.) He knows how to Floo – well, even Harry knows how to Floo, or has at least done it before. They know how to travel the Muggle way, which is fine for the immediate area around London but not places further away – neither of them wants to sleep anywhere except in their own beds, now that they have them. </p><p>Tom knows – well, Voldemort does, and now Tom does, too – how to create an untraceable portkey. (They each have one as part of a pair of magical bracelets that will take them home in a pinch, for one.) </p><p>(Their house-elf hates popping wizards about, and Tom hates relying on another so much, so that is an option reserved for dire emergencies.)</p><p>So while they stick to Diagon Alley, London, and England during the first few weeks, as the summer months go by they branch out a little and they have a list hanging in their kitchen with ideas for places to visit on the Continent or even further away.</p><p>*</p><p>Throughout all this, Harry does his summer homework. Tom squints at it and reads Harry’s school books to try and determine how the curriculum has changed in 50 years. He’d feared he’d maybe get annoyed by a little hanger-on endlessly asking him questions, but he doesn’t. His older self had had ulterior motives, yes, but he had also genuinely wanted to go into teaching. He is good at explaining. Also, he cannot help but think of it as a giant fuck you to his older self – who wants Harry dead, the utter git – and Dumbledore – who kept Harry with “family” and left him to flounder even worse than Tom did during his own first year, utterly ignorant.</p><p>(Is this what it would have felt like if another, younger wizard had turned up at the orphanage? Or would young Tom have squandered the chance with a possibly doomed-to-fail attempt to scapegoat the kid?)</p><p>*</p><p>They read about some bloke escaping from Azkaban, but although that fact alone is worth noticing and the name does niggle at something in Tom’s mind, they are busy with finding themselves and don’t really have the patience for ordinary wizard affairs. That’s for Tom to start and figure out once Harry has to go back to Hogwarts.</p><p>*</p><p>One weird things that happens is that Harry figures out he misses gardening. Their flat doesn’t have a garden, nor does it really have a balcony. They make a note of it for when they’ll buy themselves a house eventually. For now, they get a few plants for their living room and herbs for their kitchen and a terrarium for their snakes to lie in.</p><p>Because of cause they have snakes. They’re parselmouths, how could they not have snakes?</p><p>*</p><p>Tom makes plans. The day he turns seventeen he is going to take Voldemort for everything he owns. He’ll be of age, he’ll be able to prove by virtue of his blood that he is Tom Marvolo Riddle, and no stupid old geezer who got himself cursed incorporeal is going to keep him from his claim.</p><p>(There may no longer be anything to the name of Slytherin. But Tom who explored Muggle London alongside Harry is a lot more pragmatic than out-of-Hogwarts-Tom seems to have been, and he also has the advantage of Halloween!Tom having read up on inheritance laws along the way. With enough incentive, the goblins might be persuaded to help him claim his Muggle inheritance. Tom Riddle senior’s parents were loaded? Possibly some other relative got everything within weeks after they were murdered (after older!Tom murdered them), but the altogether four times Voldemort returned to Little Hangleton didn’t make it seem like the manor house was occupied, for one. Tom doesn’t want it, particularly, and it’s not the best idea to move there for security reasons… but he could sell the land, and the house, and the sum he could get from that is nothing to sneeze at if the Gaunts really squandered all of their ancient Slytherin inheritance.)</p><p>Tom Marvolo Riddle once had grand political ambitions. Tom Riddle doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Wizarding World other than for what it has to offer. At sixteen he’d made a Horcrux because he felt threatened by war and no wizard was inclined to help him. Now, as long as their fellow wizards pose no threat to Tom doing whatever the hell he wants – by which he means learning, buying a house, being treated with respect by others and keeping his new found brother at all costs – he sees no need to become anything like a Dark Lord again. (That doesn’t mean he won’t do his damnedest to become an even better duellist than Voldemort, or to learn powers of which Lord Voldemort knows not – if a threat arises, be it Voldemort, Dumbledore, or someone else – Tom intends to take care of the matter with extreme prejudice.) (Hell, if it’s a threat that arises at Hogwarts he’ll enlist the help of the Basilisk.)</p><p>(Oh, and one day he will teach Defense against the Dark Arts at the castle. Even if he then finds out its not really for him after all and he ends up only doing it for a year. If he has to wait until Dumbledore keels over from old age, so be it. Time is on his side, now, for this. And if he finds it is his life’s calling, well, it’s not as Tom Riddle getting his wish doesn’t disable Voldemort’s curse.)</p><p>*</p><p>Of course there also is the issue of Harry’s friends.</p><p>The kids trade letters all summer long, and Harry sometimes recounts tidbits of what they write, even if Tom is not all that interested in the little Weasley and the girl. The Weasley family is of some minor importance because of Ginny, whom Tom does owe a debt even if he is far from ready to acknowledge it just yet. It’s somewhat important to know how she is doing, if there are long-term effects of Tom’s possession of her, and if she remembers anything that could spell trouble for Tom’s newly won life. (It’s important for the girl’s sake insofar as Harry will be miserable if it turns out she is suffering, and Tom very much likes the state of their relationship as it is right now, thanks ever so.)</p><p>(The Weasleys are also important because last summer they were willing to take Harry in, which means that they know a little more about Harry’s life with the Dursleys than Tom is comfortable with, but also that they are a pureblood family who would take in an orphan despite their limited financial means simply because he was friends with their youngest son. Such soft-heartedness can be exploited, but on the other hand it’s loyalty of a kind that forever escaped Voldemort, which Tom realizes is something to be coveted – and thus, since Harry seems to have somehow secured it, something to be protected.)</p><p>Egypt sounds interesting, but Tom can hardly expect detailed reports from the letters of a twelve-year-old, so. If Harry were to strike up a correspondence with that other brother, Percy, now… Well, at the very least he and Harry get some ideas of new locations to add to their travel plans for the future.</p><p>The Granger girl – Hermione – is also travelling with her parents, adding to the Potter-Riddle’s globe hopping list as well. Her descriptions of places she visits are far more in-depth than the Weasley boy’s,  which Tom appreciates. (Harry just appreciates being able to freely exchanging letters with his friends. And giving Hedwig the opportunities to fly – even if he doesn’t send her quite as far away as Egypt.)</p><p>The issue of what Harry is to tell his best friends about the drastic change in his living situation never quite comes up. Tom rather sensibly is loathe to ask Harry to lie, even if he’d obviously prefer it if the boy did. Any lie told now can come to bite them both later, so yes, against Tom’s instincts it’s better to not lie at all.</p><p>Harry, on the other hand, has already spent the last two weeks at Hogwarts lying by omission, so he is less broken up about it than he might otherwise have been. His newfound life with Tom is something he really, really wants to keep. He doesn’t want Ron or Hermione to become suspicious, or to worry over how he’s suffering at the Dursleys’ when this glorious summer he decidedly isn’t. So instead he writes them that he’s living somewhere after having moved in with a distant relative, that he can’t tell them in a letter with who and where to in case the letter gets intercepted.</p><p>(Unbeknownst to Harry, here the great escape of Sirius Black works in his favour – Ron mentions something about it and his parents assume that Dumbledore has moved their son’s friend for his safety; Hermione, not quite yet cognizant of the Black-Potter connection but aware that any Death Eater would see Harry as a target, is relieved that someone seems to be sensible about this.)</p><p>(The Dursleys, free of the burden of having to stay in Surrey all summer for the sake of the blood wards, have rather hastily gone on a holiday somewhere; Mrs. Figg’s report of this occasion, her assumption that since they haven’t dumped the kid on her he must be with them, and Dumbledore’s own assumptions about shared blood being enough to spark love, lead him to assure himself and the Ministry that Harry is safe since even if Black found their house he would not find out where they had gone – and indeed Vernon and Petunia did not tell anyone exactly where they planned to go, they did not want any wizards to come knocking now that their nephew was gone, thank you.)</p><p>(It works in their favour until Harry is on the train back to Hogwarts and Tom reads the news for the first time in weeks and then suddenly his vague plan to sort out what to do with himself now if he’s not going to be a Dark Lord is derailed by the need to murder a – a murder of dementors. And the Minister of Magic. And Sirius Black. Maybe.)</p><p>.</p>
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